World And Self

By K. Srilata, *Wordless as the flight of birds * - The Hindu - India
Sunday, December 6, 2009

Two poetry collections, embodying two different approaches to the world and self.

A Face that Does Not Bear the Imprints of the World, Usha Akella; The Buddha and Other Poems, Jiban Narah, Monsoon Editions, p.82 price not stated.

“A poem should be wordless,” says Archibald MacLeish, “as the flight of birds”. There is a quietness to much of Usha Akella's verse, a quietness between words, that soothes us like chamomile.

Usha writes in the Sufi tradition, a tradition marked by a turning away from all else but God, a tradition based on the letting go of duality.

The poems in her anthology A Face that Does Not Bear the Footprints of the World are essentially songs for the beloved. But in the Sufi scheme of things, who is the beloved if not God? And who is God if not the beloved? The Sufi spirit dances like a dervish, especially in the nine-odd poems Usha has classified under the theme “Beloved”, the strongest in the collection. The poet-narrator becomes “a divining fork tuned to only one thing”.

“Come back to me old and gray/ Do away with the pounding of the blood, Let Time trace wrinkles on your face,” the poet writes. She goes on to describing her beloved as one whose “failures sit on [his] shoulders as irreverent monkeys”. There is a wiped-clean mirror feeling to the verse in this section. Usha writes of “a face that bears not the world's footprints/Nothing has touched it except my Love”. There are some amazing images. Usha likens the succumbing to love to “a fish lying in the sun ready to die”.

Rhythmic cadence

A few of the poems — “Yes! Yes!”, for instance and “Love has forgotten her heart” — are meant to be read aloud, performed, sung. Clearly, there is a certain rhythm that the poet intended, a certain pace and beat but the printed word, as always, fails to convey that.

On the other end of the spectrum, some poems such as “Love is so busy” and “From the Rooftop” suffer from an excess of words and an absence of crafting. “I am tired of being you/ I am tired of being rebellious/ I am tired of second-guessing…” writes Usha in the latter poem, repeating one tired, unmusical phrase over and over again at least half a dozen times. It is the poems that do not “bear the footprints of the world” that are the most evocative.

Characterised by a lyricism and economy, Jiban Narah's poems, translated from the Assamese by Pradip Acharya, Krishna Dulal Barua and Niren Thakuria, draw extensively on Mishing myths. Steeped as they are in folk themes, the poems in the anthology The Buddha and Other Poems pose a challenge to the non-Assamese reader. But for that very reason, they also provide an interesting entry into another culture. Quite sensibly, the translators have not smoothed all the bumps for us and the reading remains awkward, pushing us beyond the poem to its footnotes. We learn (thanks to the footnotes) that the first man on earth is “abotani”, the god of water is “Jalakhai” and the god of land “thalakai”. We go back and forth a lot. Something is lost, no doubt, in the process. But we also gain another world.

There are other poems that resonate well in English, perhaps for the reason that their canvas is larger than the Mishing one Narah uses in so many of his poems or perhaps because the poet has successfully internalised and re-woven the folk into his personal canvas. “The Gourd Blossom” is one that travels lightly:

A rain drenched flute kept playing
One by one dreams kept falling
like leaves
I am a small sailboat
the note of the flute
makes me reach out to the banks
like a river
I would rather not spend this night alone
I am the lone first blossom
of the Flame of the Forest

In “Poetry” too the images sparkle and speak to us personally: “Knowing trees to be with bliss-hued leaves as birds/ yet you take the leaves for birds/ Aware that the birds aren't trees/ yet you plant birds”.

Narah uses colours to sensuous effect. In “Colours” he writes: Right after birth/ grandmother had ducked me in the green/ My mother picked me up/ from among the yellow….” Colours are central to Mishing culture and in Narah's poems they work both metaphorically as well as literally.

Narah's route to the world may be the Mishing route but it is a route that takes him both back to himself and out to the world beyond, to readers from other spaces.

The reviewer is a poet, fiction writer and faculty at IIT Madras. Email: sree@iitm.ac.in.